the dream thief
by Broken Elsewhere
Summary: They both knew what it meant to wake up in a cold sweat and not know why - Yamato, Anko


**Disclaimer: **Naruto belongs to Kishimoto. This story belongs to me.

**note: **I don't know why, but I like the characters of Yamato and Anko. They've both suffered because of Orochimaru, and yet they get so little spotlight in the manga. So, I decided to change that.  
**note2: **I have no idea what Yamato's real name is, so I just used 'Tenzo'. Forgive me if I get any backstory details wrong.  
**note3: **I'm experimenting with writing styles right now. Enjoy.  
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Let me tell you a story:

Once upon a time…

(All the best stories begin like this)

… there was an evil man searching for immortality…

…who got his just deserts.

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No. We're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's try it again, shall we?

Once upon a time…

…there was a little boy and a little girl…

…given gifts they didn't want.

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That's not how it goes. Third time's the charm?

Once upon a time…

…there were two children…

…dreaming in their beds.

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_No no no stop stop stop go away go away go away pleasepleasepleaseplease_

Anko jerks awake in the silent darkness, heart pounding a deafening tempo in her head, skin clammy. She can't recall anything in her not-nightmares – because they aren't nightmares, but a fear that creeps on the edges of her dreams as she sleeps. Nightmares are the things you fear made worse, and Anko doesn't think that what she fears _could _be made any more terrifying.

What she remembers (she wished she didn't, wished and wished and _wished_) are fleeting, flashing images, sensations that make her blood run cold, phantom memories of sheer terror burnt into her consciousness.

She wrenches off the blankets, damp from sweat, and listens to the gentle humming of the hospital equipment, like the lullaby of a mother, telling her _it's alright now, hush, go to sleep. _Three weeks she has spent in this hospital room, but the shadows linger on, leaving her restless, unsettled and filled by, more than anything, the desire to not be left alone.

The mark on the back of her neck burns.

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If this were a fairytale, the word would be…

_Elsewhere…_

Tenzo sleeps and dreams of trees. Dreams of their long branches swaying in the wind, their roots crawling deep beneath the earth, searching for water. Dreams of trees stretching out towards the sun, growing ever taller, bursting out through the soil, the stone, his back…

He forces his eyes open, the start of a strangled scream clawing at his throat. He checks his body all over, trying to make certain that in his sleep he hadn't grown branches and roots and leaves. He breathes, tries to relax. It won't happen again – he won't let it, won't, won't, _won't_ – but sometimes his vision goes green and then…

It was years and years and years ago, and Tenzo has trained himself to repress bad memories (but they're not memories, they're dreams; not the things you remember, the thing you forget – _remember_?) so he can't understand why he might be slipping. He is better than this.

The pockets of shadow where the light doesn't reach make him uneasy, and Tenzo wants, more than anything, to run to a place where the dark cannot reach out with its cold, cold hands and snatch him back.

Outside, the trees stir the wind.

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By the rules of the storyteller, the sentiment would be…

_And then…_

She takes to wandering the hospital. The ANBU outside her door block her way out, so she finds an alternative. She pops her window open, shimmies up a pipe, crawls along the roof and hops into another wing through the window. She's done it enough times to know how not to get caught, and she's _good_.

She should be. She was trained by the best (don't' want to think about it, don't wanna, don't wanna, why, why, why).

Anko hates the hospital, with its cloying, unnatural smell and harsh, bright lights and needles (because needles remind her of teeth which remind her of the Seal which brings her right back to -). But mostly, _mostly_, she hates the stares.

She hates the pity-stares, the sad-stares, the we-should-have-known-better-we're-so-sorry stares. She doesn't want pity or grief or the fact that they really should have known better, but they _didn't. _It's the angry-stares she hates the most, though.

The people who stare at her like they wish she had died instead, like she was going to turn into a monster, like it was only a matter of time before she would turn into her former sensei, and _then _the Hokage would wish he'd listened to them, just you wait and _see_.

Sometimes, Anko almost wants to prove them right.

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And here, _here_, is where the story starts to take its course, _here…_

…is where it _really _all began. Once upon a time…

Her feet take her through the wards in the last wing of the hospital, and then pause. There's a door there, and it's just like hers.

There are several ANBU positioned outside, and the door is open. Not because it's a hot summer afternoon, but because they don't believe the person inside won't make a break for it, because they're afraid he might relapse and start rampaging, because there is no such thing as _privacy _and _trust_ in this world.

Not for people like them.

Anko casually leans against the doorway. The boy sitting on the bed, back turned, doesn't look her way, but he knows she's there. His shoulders hunch as she knocks on the wood of the door. The leaves on the trees dance as the breezes slips through them.

"Hey, Tenzo," she says, and grins.

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The doctors stop trying to make her leave after two days. She is staying in Tenzo's room, whether they like it or not. She suspects they think it's out of some form of hysteria, or attachment issues or some kind of coping mechanism. Anko doesn't know why she stays either.

She tells herself that it's because she needs someone, anyone, really, and if she couldn't find someone who could take care of her, she would at least settle for someone who could take care of themselves.

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Tenzo isn't the talkative sort, but when he does speak, Anko knows it must be something important. Mostly, he sits, legs crossed, in his drab hospital attire, and stares out the window. Anko wonders what he is thinking about. Wonders what is stopping him from leaping out the window and running far from Konoha's walls.

"Did it hurt?" he asks one day. Anko tilts her head and considers.

Part of her – the traitorous part, the awful part, the part she wishes she could rip out and _hurl_ somewhere – wants to tell him that it didn't. That it was an honor to be chosen by Orochimaru-_sensei_ (Orochimaru, Orochimaru, _Orochimaru_, and _never_ anything else but that) to test the Cursed Seal of Heaven, which was why she had felt no pain at all.

Then she remembers dark rooms, and something crawling and burning across her skin and through her mind, and the terrible, inhuman screaming that she had made. She remembers Orochimaru leaning over her, smiling and saying, _hush; this will all be over quick. _Anko feels wrong inside her skin, like there is something eating away at her, until there will be nothing left of her.

She fingers the mark.

Tenzo watches the movement, face impassive and yet inquisitive at the same time, as though he is hungry – desperate – for the answer that she will give.

"Like hell," she whispers.

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Turn a page.

Look.

_Deeper. _

Tenzo is in the hospital because, in the middle of the orphanage's yard, branches and roots burst out of his back before he could stop himself, shooting into everything and anything around him. Twelve people were dead before the ANBU managed to stop him.

He'd been set to the hospital for intensive study and rehabilitation. He let them. The orphanage had closed its doors to him. He didn't have anywhere else to go (no family, no friends, nothing, nothing).

It wasn't his fault, the Hokage told him. They had believed that the DNA grafted into his body couldn't have been used, that it wasn't possible for him to use Hashirama's abilities. It was _their _fault, he insisted.

Tenzo knows better (they're always the ones who know better. Isn't that just sad?). The Hokage was not there when the woman spat on his face and told him that he had no right to be alive when Orochimaru had killed her son in his experiments. The Hokage was not there when no one did anything to stop her.

The Hokage was not there when every last bit of resentment and prejudice and hate he has had to endure for years _explodes_.

Tenzo knows whose fault it was.

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Once, a nurse refuses to give Anko food. She finds out much later that the woman was the mother of one of the nine who had died testing the Cursed Seal. The woman looks at Anko, her eyes accusatory. But Anko knows better (she is beginning to hate that phrase). And if the woman knew better, too, she would know that her son was better off dead. She almost feels like going over to the woman and telling her that, then decides it doesn't matter.

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Anko lied. What she wants is to go over to that woman and tell her that, straight to the face. What she wants is for that woman to hit her, just so that she had an excuse to hit back and not feel like a monster, to punch and bite and kick and cry, and claim that it was from pain, not guilt.

Instead, Anko goes to bed and never looks at that woman again.

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Time passes.

Anko chatters more than most people he's met. But Anko is not most people, not afraid or repulsed or full of hatred towards him. Anko understands the monsters that lurk beneath the bed, and the things that haunt him in the night.

What confused him was how she hadn't curled inside herself after what had been done to her. He expected her to turn pale and wither away. He hadn't expected her to get right back up and keep barreling onwards, full of energy and anger and strength and _life. _

…He didn't understand her. He didn't know what to think of her. But he pushed aside these thoughts and promised himself that he'd figure her out, that he'd figure out why she acted so strange and how she could still be _real _after everything she had suffered.

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Time passes.

"Do you remember what happened to you?" she asks, one day.

Tenzo looks up at her. Her face is turned towards the window, brown eyes trained on the people passing two and fro far below them. The hospital gown exposes the mark on her neck, the three black tomoe that will never, ever go away.

He's lucky, he knows. There is nothing on his body to remind him of what had happened. It is enough, that, perhaps, in a few years, people will have forgotten who he is (or maybe that is too much to hope for).

But there are scars. And those, too, will never, _ever_ go away.

He realizes he's drifted off when Anko pokes him – hard – in the stomach. She wants his answer, and if he doesn't give it, there will be bruises.

He shakes his head, slowly. Her face darkens. He pauses. There is something. Something old. Something ingrained in every instinct and memory, something he can't quite place or understand, but it is _there_, even though he was nothing more than a child when it happened, but this he remembers, with more clarity than anything that has ever happened to him.

Do you understand what it is, Tenzo?

"I remember pain," he tells her.

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Time passes.

There are days when Anko does nothing but watch Tenzo. It is easy to do so. Tenzo has not yet realized that his expressions, his movements, give away more than his words can. He'll understand, in time. Right now, it is not his fault.

He doesn't know better (that hated, hated phrase).

She brings her legs to her chest and hunches over, hugging them. It is raining, and Anko wants to run outside and revel in it – if just to be freed of the constant monologue inside her head. A different kind of freedom – no worries, no fear, just pure instinct.

Tenzo grips his hand, concentrating, and Anko takes to watching him again.

Slowly, his fingers turn into thin shoots, and then return to being fingers again. Over and over. Anko stares at the movement, hypnotized. It seems so effortless, so easy and without pain. It is nothing like the Cursed Seal.

Tenzo's face says otherwise.

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A boy watches them from doorway. The light glints off his silver-gray hair and glasses, and Anko feels cold all over, and doesn't quite know why. She has felt this once before, and it terrifies her. Something in her tells her to run away, far away. A self-preservation instinct, maybe.

"What are you looking at?" she snaps at him, trying to be taller (braver) than she really is. The boy starts, then runs away. Anko shudders. Tenzo looks at her strangely, wordlessly.

"He was just curious," he says. Anko folds her arms and glares. She cannot explain this feeling, and doesn't want to. She knows better than Tenzo, after all (still that hated-hated phrase, but does that change anything?).

"He's a creep," she states firmly, and that was that. Tenzo has known her long enough that getting into an argument with Anko was pointless. If she didn't have reason, she would go for volume. Understanding smoothes his features. He drops the subject.

Far away, down the corridor, the little boy with gray hair and glasses turns his head and looks back at the room. He thinks, and then he goes.

Time would prove Anko right.

But that is another story…

…This is now.

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Anko steals a flashlight and proudly displays her trophy to him. Tenzo picks it up and turns it over in his hands. How she managed to get her hands on such an expensive model is a mystery to him, but with Anko, anything is possible. He tries shining it under his face.

"I don't have problems ruling by fear," he intones. She looks at him for all of three seconds, then starts rolling around on the bed in laughter. For once, she looks like a twelve-year-old should, young and happy and innocent.

"You call _that _scary?" she asks, still snickering. Tenzo looks at her, pride wounded. She snorts, and grabs the flashlight. "I'll show you _scary_."

Considering the fact that he's seen Anko licking the blood off scalpels, he wonders if he ought to start running. But Anko is no better at it than him.

(Because they know scary, they know terrifying, and neither wants to go back to that dark corner, because –)

They spend the whole afternoon playing with it, and for the first time in a very long while, they laugh until they cry.

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Sometimes Anko cries in her sleep. Once, he asks her about it in the morning. She starts yelling and screaming at him, and storms from the room. She does not come back for three days.

Tenzo tries to pretend he doesn't feel lonely.

He wakes up, late at night, at a noise he hears over the thunder and rain. Lightning flashes, illuminating the thin, hunched figure curled at the foot of his bed. He says nothing, only extends a blanket towards it. The figure grabs it, glares, then snuggles up against the wall and promptly goes to sleep. He half-smiles.

He never asks her why she came back.

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If this were that kind story…

(And you know in your heart it isn't)

This is how it would have ended.

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Once upon a time…

…There was an evil man…

…that was slain…

…and a monster…

….that was eventually killed…

…and all things concluded, everyone who had ever been wronged by the darkness that waits just outside the bedroom window…

…lived happily ever after.

Once upon a time.

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That is not how the story ends.

This is how it ends.

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Time passes.

There are two children, dreaming in their bed. There is something about surviving Orochimaru that leaves a horrific kinship in its wake, even if they can't quite remember what had been done to them; each understands what it means to wake in a cold sweat and not know _why_, to feel exposed, alone, _vulnerable_, while the village sleeps on around them.

Tomorrow, they will both be discharged from the hospital. Tenzo will be sent directly to the ANBU. He will not be offered a genin team. No one tells him it's because of who he is – or more accurately, _what_ he is. They don't have to.

Tenzo is many things, but he's not stupid.

Anko doesn't know where she will go. There are only so many paths she can walk. Maybe find a new team. A new sensei. As though, in hopes, that will erase the past, as though Orochimaru and the Curse Seal were just another bad dream that she'll soon be able to forget.

Tomorrow, they will part ways and company and maybe, once in a very long while, they will pause, and think, just for a second, that they saw the other. But that doesn't matter.

…Because perhaps here…

…in Konoha's hospital, with the trees stirring the wind and the rain pelting down, and two children curled up beneath a blanket as the light pools around them, stretched across an infinite sky full of infinite possibilities…

…and perhaps here…

…where, when they face it together, the nameless, formless thing in the dark has little power, where they can pretend they don't know better…

…perhaps just for a moment…

…until the sun comes up, and the clouds part, and the trees stop dancing, and the real world makes itself known, until the next time…

…just for tonight…

They lived, happily ever after.

_the end_

**note4: **Reviews would be wonderful.


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